A popular form of advertising on large private networks or public networks, such as the Internet, is through the use of electronic mail. In a typical scenario, companies purchase or collate lists of user e-mail addresses and then send unsolicited commercial messages, such as advertisements, announcements, etc., to those users. Commonly known as "spam" or electronic junk mail, these messages often relate to goods or services which the recipient doesn't want or need. The response rate to these types of unsolicited messages is extremely low, typically less than one-tenth of one percent, and the vast majority of the messages are deleted without even being read. In addition, because of the volume of unsolicited messages received by a typical party, there is a high likelihood that the recipient will become biased against the sponsor of the message because of the unwelcome method of delivery, even if they might otherwise be interested in the subject matter.
One approach to this problem is to target messages to particular individuals according to their interests by allowing individuals to "subscribe" to particular mailing lists in advance. In a typical situation, an individual accesses an Internet web-page which provides a list of various subject categories. The individuals then subscribe to one or more categories that interests them and provide their e-mail address and various types of demographic information.
The premise behind this approach is that the listed addresses represent individuals who have taken the affirmative step of voluntarily signing up to receive commercial e-mail about topics of interest, and thus the response rate should be greater than completely unsolicited e-mail. However, this premise is only somewhat correct. In practice, a certain percentage of subscriptions are not made by the listed party, but rather result from the action of third parties. Thus, when a company uses a given subscription list to target commercial messages, many of the recipients will consider the messages to be unsolicited advertisements, resulting in the generation of bad-will toward the company. Even if the recipient is provided with the option of having themselves removed from the mailing list, this option is not available until after the fact, and so is relatively ineffective in preventing at least some unsolicited messages from being sent.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method by which a subscription address list may be generated with the assurance that substantially all of the listed addresses represent individuals who have voluntarily signed up to receive messages related to particular topics.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a subscription system and method which does not require an individual who has been subscribed against their will to take any action to be removed from the mailing list.